This is a four-volume set aiming to provide a
description of (mainly structural) features of
pidgin and creole languages world-wide. The
first volume, the Atlas (henceforth: APiCS)
provides a survey of linguistic features across
all languages regardless of area or lexifier
language, while the three survey volumes
(henceforth: SPiCL) provide descriptions of
individual languages divided by lexifier. In
what follows I will first describe the APiCS
and then the SPiCL.

The APiCS has a general introduction to the set
in which the design of the volumes is explained
in some detail. The term “pidgin and creole
languages” is used traditionally without an
attempt at a new definition (xxxv). 76 pidgins
and creoles were chosen, and all the
descriptions provided throughout the four
volumes are based on these 76 languages. Since
the total number of pidgins and creoles
world-wide is considerably higher, this is only
a limited sample. Furthermore, as the editors
frankly admit, and even emphasize, the sample
is not necessarily balanced, and has a bias
towards languages with English as the lexifier
(27), followed by Portuguese (14) and French
(9). Only a minority of languages (19) do not
have a European lexifier. The idea for this
volume was born at a conference in 2005,
leading to the formation of the editorial team.
According to the editors, the bias was
unavoidable, as contributors for many languages
that would have been interesting for the sake
of more balance or for specific features were
simply not available. Therefore, the results
presented in the APiCS are not necessarily
representative of pidgins and creoles in
general. However, they reflect the current
landscape of research, and are therefore close
to the optimum of what is practically
possible.

Readers familiar with the World Atlas of
Language Structures (WALS; Haspelmath et al.
2005), will immediately identify the APiCS as a
sister volume to this prominent predecessor.
While the WALS presents descriptions and maps
of 142 structural and lexical features in a
sample of 200 languages world-wide, the APiCS
has 130. For the sake of cross-linguistic
comparability, the features are abstract ones,
such as “order of adjective and noun” or
“indefinite pronouns”, and are not bound to
concrete forms. Thus, “adjectives” will include
semantic-functional equivalents to adjectives,
even if they morphosyntactically behave as
verbs or nouns in a particular language. Many
of the features are taken from the WALS — some
of the WALS features were discarded, as they
turned out to not be meaningfully applicable to
the new sample of languages — and some features
were taken from Holm & Patrick’s (2007)
systematic survey of semantic and syntactic
features in 18 creole languages. However, there
are a number of decisive differences between
WALS and APiCS. The most important one is that
while in the WALS, the entries on each
structural feature were written by experts on
these features who extracted the required
information from available language
descriptions, in the APiCS, the expert on a
particular language cooperating in the project
contributed the data directly. Therefore, the
“APiCS Consortium”, that is, the 88 experts
cooperating in the project, are co-authors on
each entry (the other authors are the editors
in charge of a particular entry).

This approach has far-reaching consequences for
the reliability of the data. In early reviews
of the WALS (e.g. Bright 2007, Donohue 2006),
the reviewers pointed out rather striking
shortcomings in the analysis of data from
languages of their own area of expertise. The
reviewers estimated a margin of error of 10 to
20% in the data. Since the WALS has been
continuously updated in its online version,
many of these errors will have been remedied by
now, but they remain in the book version. With
the APiCS approach, such errors are practically
ruled out, unless they are at a level of
disagreement among experts on a particular
language regarding how to analyze a specific
phenomenon in that language. Inconsistencies,
in terms of sample size and analysis across
entries, which were another point of criticism
against the WALS, are also practically ruled
out in the APiCS. This apparently took an
immense amount of work; the editors describe in
the introduction that they repeatedly refined
their questionnaire and had the authors review
and revise their data for the survey.

Other differences include more flexibility in
the classification of features (in the APiCS, a
language is allowed to have two complementary
values of a feature at the same time), and the
lack of a CD-Rom. APiCS data are available
online (http://apics-online.info/),
which eliminates the need for an additional
data disk.

The 130 features are divided as follows: word
order (12 features), nominal categories (24
features), nominal syntax (6 features), verbal
categories (14 features), argument marking (16
features), clausal syntax (19 features),
complex sentences (8 features), negation,
questions and focusing (7 features), lexicon
(11 features), and phonology (13 features).
Each entry on a feature (“chapter”) is
organized into two parts, a text and a map. The
text consists of: (1) feature description, (2)
the values, and (3) distribution, and usually
has two pages. It is followed by a two-page
world map in a Gall-Peter projection (which
distinguishes itself from other world map
projections by keeping the circumpolar regions
small) on which colored dots, each representing
a language, indicate the presence, absence, or
nature of the particular feature in that
language. The large majority of features are
just what one would expect from such a map.
Besides those already mentioned, we find
entries such as “definite articles” (nominal
categories), “marking of possessor noun
phrases” (nominal syntax), “tense-aspect
systems” (verbal categories), “expletive
subject of existential verbs” (argument
marking), “reflexive constructions” (clausal
syntax), “subject relative clauses” (complex
sentences), “polar questions” (negation,
questions, and focusing), “hand and arm’”
(lexicon), and “tone” (phonology). It would be
futile to criticize the lack of features that
were present in the WALS, since the editors
ensure us that they went through a gradual
process of narrowing down many more features
than those that actually worked. Some features
will strike the average reader, at least the
non-creolist, as exotic. Thus, we find an
“antidual of paired body-part terms” (ch. 27),
or the lexicalization of Portuguese pequenino
(ch. 109), and the Romance ‘know’ verbs saber
(Portuguese, Spanish) and savoir (French) (ch.
110). The latter two are deviations from the
volume design because they deal with concrete
forms. However, the striking fact about them is
that they can also be found in languages that
have a non-Romance lexifier. Thus, these
seemingly exotic chapters legitimately reflect
what is found to be interesting or striking for
creolists. The 130 entries are followed by a
list of references, a subject index, an author
index, and a language index.

The SPiCL is divided into three volumes on
Germanic-based (i.e. English- and Dutch-based
languages: Volume I; 28 Chapters),
Romance-based (i.e. Portuguese-based,
Spanish-based and French-based languages:
Volume II; 27 Chapters), and contact languages
based on languages from Africa, Asia,
Australia, and the Americas (Volume III, 19
Chapters). Each chapter is written by the same
expert or team of experts that contributed the
respective information to the APiCS. With
remarkable consequence, the SPiCL chapters also
have a unified format with identical section
titles, and almost identical length. Each
chapters starts with (1) an introduction, which
is accompanied by an areal map, followed by (2)
sociohistorical background, (3) sociolinguistic
situation, (4) phonology, (5) noun phrase, (6)
verb phrase, (7) simple sentences, (8) complex
sentences, a short glossed text, and the
references, squeezed into 8 to 11 pages of
relatively dense two-column print. A sound file
for many of the glossed texts is freely
available on the APiCS webpage. Despite the
unified format, these chapters also provided
the opportunity for authors to point out
structural features that were not included in
the APiCS survey. Thus, for example, we find
some details on several types of adverbial
clauses in section 8, and information on left
dislocation and topicalization in section 9 of
the Sranan chapter (Volume I; authored by
Donald Winford and Ingo Plag). In contrast, the
APiCS volume has no chapters dedicated to
adverbial clauses and information structure.
Generally, though, the information in the SPiCL
chapters is fairly concise and almost
bare-bones, given the obvious constraints on
their length. The articles are followed by a
general index. The closest predecessors to the
SPiCL that I am aware of is Holm (1989) a
single-authored work, which covers more than a
100 languages, but in considerably less detail,
and the above-mentioned Holm & Patrick
(2007), which has descriptions of 18 languages
by experts on them. Furthermore, we have the
Atlas of the Languages of Suriname, by Carlin
& Arends (2002), which is very nicely
edited with many maps and figures, but confined
to the languages of that region.

The APiCS online (http://apics-online.info)
provides the following: a map of all languages
and a short description of each language with a
link to each feature, the audio file of the
glossed text (if available), a comprehensive
list of sources on each language, a short
description and map for each feature, a list of
example sentences with glosses, a list of
sources with more than 1,500 entries, and a
list of authors with affiliations and homepage
links. The list of sources, the list of
languages, and a database of features are
freely downloadable. The SPiCL is
understandably not part of the online edition.
In print, the combined APiCS and SPiCL are
available both individually and as a
four-volume set (at a discount). There is also
the option to purchase a package of the
three-volume SPiCL at a discount compared to
the individual volumes.

EVALUATION

From the description above, it is clear that
the APiCS is groundbreaking in several
respects. First, there has never been a
systematic description of structural (and some
lexical) features at the same scale before. The
desirability of such a description is beyond
doubt. Most linguists agree on the special
status of pidgins and creoles in the study of
language. The WALS 200-language sample only
included a single creole language, and the WALS
100-language sample not even a single one,
thus, this group of languages was not well
served in the WALS. The unprecedented scale of
systematic description is compounded by the
flexibility with which the results can be used
through the availability of data in electronic
form. Even the accompanying SPiCL, which is not
available in electronic form, is unprecedented
in scale and systematicity.

Will the APiCS and SPiCL be useful to linguists
and help to advance the field? There is little
doubt about this. It is now possible to obtain
and compare features of pidgins and creoles at
a glance or a mouse-click. This is not only
relevant for specialists in the field but also
general linguists, typologists, students of
syntax, of language acquisition, etc., who can
get an immediate answer if they wonder about
the presence or absence of specific linguistic
features in pidgins and creoles. The
availability and combinability of information
on such features can also lead to new research
questions, such as the correlation between
specific features. The complementary SPiCL
provides concise and reliable information on an
exceptionally wide range of languages in one
publication. We have, meanwhile, many
encyclopedic volumes about language families
and language areas through series such as the
Routledge Language Family Series and the
Cambridge Language Surveys, but not many can
match the SPiCL with respect to number of
languages covered in exactly the same depth and
format.

Decisively for quality, the APiCS data and the
SPiCL chapters were provided by experts on the
respective languages. This guarantees a level
of quality that was not available with the
WALS. It means that quibbles over the language
description and data interpretation are
practically restricted to issues between
experts on the languages. Since all data were
thoroughly filtered by the editors, it also
means that all data are fully comparable across
languages. This was another complaint leveraged
against the WALS that does not hold for the
APiCS.

Finally, what is left to be desired? It would
not be difficult to make up a list of languages
and of linguistic features that might have been
part of the APiCS (and SPiCL). I already
mentioned adverbial clauses or information
structure above. Furthermore, there are no
German- or Russian-based languages included.
Here, we have to trust the editors who tell us
that they picked up as much as was practically
possible. The 130 features across 76 languages
are doubtlessly a great accomplishment. One
possible objection is that linguistic features
should have been included for which comparable
information could have been extracted only in a
limited number of languages. However, this
would have led to an unevenness in description
that might have provoked more complaints about
the design of the APiCS than their
omission.

One thing that I personally missed, and I think
could have been provided, was a map of “all”
pidgins and creoles worldwide, to the extent
that they are known. Further distinguishing
those included in the APiCS sample and those
that were not may have helped to get a better
picture of how representative or
non-representative the 76-language sample is
after all. The editors caution us that it is
not necessarily representative but it would be
good to know to what extent this is the
case.

Overall, I think that the APiCS and the SPiCL
are an outstanding achievement by the editors
and authors, and a great service to the
linguistic community.

Heiko Narrog is an associate professor at
Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. His
research interests include language typology,
historical linguistics, syntax and semantics,
modality, and the Japanese language.